In my not infrequent travels around the country, I always make a point of buying and reading local newspapers. The situation with American journalism is not good. To those who complain about this paper’s occasional typo or duplication or “day-old news,” I suggest you look around to see how much worse off we could be.

Many cities with populations 10 to 100 times that of central Vermont now have papers published only every other day or even weekly. Many formerly powerful papers are now full of poorly edited articles pulled off dubious parts of the Internet. Or they are owned by companies with no intention of giving a balanced presentation of news.

I don’t excuse the infrequent mistakes made in this paper — nor do I believe they go unnoticed by the editors — and I, too, miss its former thickness and breadth, but I also very much appreciate the cohesive, well-organized approach they’ve evolved and the devotion to a fine balance of local and international news. The local news coverage — from the quirky police blotter to the fabulous photographs to the informative arts section to the editorials to the coverage of local politics — is, I believe, really important to the community.

As for the news being “day-old,” I think our expectations have barely kept pace with the speed of the Internet. No print edition I know of can keep up with those unrealistic ideas. The Times Argus electronic edition is, by the way, a great option that not only helps the paper reduce their costs and improve their viability but also provide faster, more widely connected sources of news.

I’m grateful to be able to get a daily, local paper still grounded in both national and world perspective that doesn’t solely represent the point of view of a large corporation.